So obviously I have been somewhere the past two weeks, the question is where. I can barely remember. It would seem that immediately after having my little magic breakthrough, I was set to experience some setbacks, courtesy of both the Universe and myself (not that one isn’t a part of the other).
Okay, so to speak plainly, I have been exhausted, anxious, and definitely not centered in what Rao calls “calm being.” Rao says that there are two ways of approaching life, from a standpoint of “frantic doing” or from one of “calm being.” I had a nice little calm being thing going on at the beginning of the month, which devolved into frantic doing at the end.
Why? A couple reasons, some beyond my control, some well within it. One of them was that one of my jobs was experiencing a particularly busy week and I worked about 40 extra hours last week (in addition to my regular 40). I am still a little shell-shocked from that insanity. Another was that I overscheduled myself–I started two classes (swimming and Italian), went out more than I usually do (concerts, dinner, going out, etc), and had a spate of meetings. Add to this one of my ongoing projects experienced a little bump with the other two people I work on it with. Let’s just say one of these people is a frantic do-er and resents being held back by any attempts to remain calmly being.
This all lead up to a teensy breakdown in situation normal this past Monday, in meditation class. I was sitting there, grasping at trying to be centered and calm and mindful and all I could do was focus on how not any of those things I was. I was thinking about everything–work, my frantic-doing partner, what I would write about the experience, how desperately I want to be calm (ha)–and the harder I tried to focus on my breath and just being in the moment, the more freaked out I became. I don’t think it was a panic attack per se, but it was very stressful and I definitely had tears in my eyes at one point, and had to adjust my seated position to a child’s pose several times throughout the hour-long session. I tried focusing on what our teacher was saying, I tried focusing on my breath, on what I was grateful for…the harder I tried the more I struggled. I even knew that my grasping was making it worse, but I didn’t know how to make it better. I was flailing. It reminded me of one of my favorite essays, by Anne Lamott, “The Muddling Glory of God,” where she writes,
“That’s me, trying to make any progress at all with family, in work, relationships, self image: scootch, scootch, stall; scootch, stall, catastrophic reversal; bog, bog, scootch. I wish grace and healing were more abacadabra kinds of things; also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace’s arrival. But no, it’s clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in silence, in the dark.”
She goes on to suppose that if you were snatched out of the mess, you’d miss the lesson. She’s so wise that Annie Lamott. I hope to be a tenth of that wise some day.
Anyways, the lessons:
I need huge swaths of time to myself, alone, to do nothing. This doesn’t make me lazy, or derelict. It’s what I need for my calm being. I know this after a spending a week frantically doing (in a high stress kind of environment no less) and all I have to show for it is mornings where I wake up as if on top of a speeding train, with no idea as to how I got there. Except the train is my thoughts. I literally wake up midthought-stream, as if it’s been going on all night while I sleep and I just tuned back in now that I’m awake (which is basically true).
I also had a small insight during meditation, which was I really want to write, and in order to do that, I am going to have to give up a lot of frantic doing to make space for it in my life. And that it’s not going to be easy because we live in a world of frantic doing. Calm being is not widely venerated. But it’s what I want, and that’s something I so rarely get messages from myself on, so I need to sit up and pay attention!
Scootch, scootch.
